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It turns out there really is a secret society of the incredibly rich who are succeeding in altering the course of history. This shadowy cadre of young guns have more power than the IMF, the Bilderburg Group, and the Knights Templar put together and they operate beneath the foothills of Palo Alto. They are known under the springtime-and-flowers-suggesting moniker of The Mayfield Fellowship Program. And you just missed the application deadline.

Mayfield Fellows (not to be confused with the nautical-themed Cloverfield Fellows) are Stanford University students initiated into a community of venture capitalists, technology giants, and multi-billionaires, like a frat devoted to world domination. For example, this week offers a fairly good window of what it means to be a Mayfield Fellow. Kevin Systrom (’05 Fellow) and Mike Krieger (’07 Fellow) put together a little iPhone app called Instagram. Now, just about everyone, including your crazy cousin, has built an iPhone app by now and most of these are on page 2000 of your search results for free games.

Systrom and Krieger, who have been in business for just 15 months and hired only 13 employees, just sold their app to Facebook for $1 billion. Yes, that was a letter “b” as in “But… how?” Systrom is pocketing $400 million and those unfortunate 13 employees now have to look for jobs and divide up $100 million amongst themselves. No fighting, kids.
Call it luck, timing, absolute financial insanity, or another day in the Fellowship. Stanford University offers the 9 month Fellowship every April to 12 undergraduates. There must be some ritual significance to the number 12. The program offers courses on technology startups, and internship at one of them (Systrom landed Twitter) and ongoing mentoring activities. It now appears that “mentoring” involves numbers with 0’s and commas.

In an interview with FastCompany magazine last year, Systrom casually mentioned that he met Mark Zuckerberg eight years ago, and was offered a job at Facebook to work on their photos. The thing is: those sorts of things don’t happen outside the Fellowship.
Systom’s connections also include Marc Andreessen, who created the world’s first web browser by in ‘93. Remember Mosaic? Andreessen hopes you don’t. Now he’s known mostly as an investor and one of Facebook’s early financial supporters. Andreessen wrote a check to Systrom for $250,000 a year before Instagram was born. This supports the theory that all startup ideas are crazy if you pitch them to the wrong people.
Systrom really is changing the world. Instagram’s digital photo filters are the first technology that can make your lame pictures of last night’s dinner actually look cool. Valuable but worth a billion? Andy Ihnatko at the Chicago Sun-Times said it best:

My best theory was that Mark Zuckerberg stood to inherit a trillion dollars from his eccentric uncle, but only if he could spend a billion dollars in less than an hour without acquiring any tangible property.

The real answer may be a) that Instagram mastered mobile, which is where Facebook needs to go; b) Instagram brings 30 million users and a feel-good vibe that Facebook lacks; c) Facebook had the money and not the time to make their own; d) dropping a cool billion makes them look like a player in the days before their IPO when public perception means everything. My theory is that by granting a large chunk of that billion in Facebook stock, they are keeping the money within The Fellowship. In any case, all their scheming may come to naught with the coming of the insect overlords.
A list of successful Mayfield Fellows on Quora is a great place to start a serious investigation or Fringe-style paranoia session. If you are merely curious, take a look at current crop of Mayfield Fellows here in these halcyon days before you will be obliged to kneel before their massive golden statues
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Instagram logged 26 photos/sec and other cool stats on the Year in Review.

Among all the depressing college-related news in the various headlines this week, there was one positive headline worth noting. It’s the headlines that Grantoo made by announcing its first nationwide public social gaming tournament. The tournament, which is set to begin on April 8, 2012, will allow students from 40 colleges and universities to earn money for college tuition. The tournament will also give the winning students an opportunity to help out some charities while playing fun games.

The tournament

The primary tournament will officially begin on Sunday, April 8, 2012 at 9 p.m. EDT. There will also be other tournaments held each day from Monday, April 9th through Saturday, April 13th. The grand prize for the first tournament will be $2,000, with $500 prizes for each of the remaining tournaments. All of the tournaments will be sponsored by WePay, who is putting up a total of $5,000 to be divided into tuition grants for 12 students. One of the stipulations is that the students must already be attending one of the 40 colleges or universities that are on Grantoo’s list of eligible schools. Another requirement is for the contestants to pledge at least 10 percent of their winnings to one of the charities that is on Grantoo’s list of verified charities. There are no entry fees or any other cost to the students to participate in the tournaments.

Basically, the way the tournament works is this:

1. College and university students go to the Grantoo website at http://sip.grantoo.org.
2. The students then check to ensure their college or university is on the eligibility list.
3. Next, the student registers an email and password with Grantoo, along with a few other details about their school attendance and choice of charities, as well as the amount of desired percentage of winnings to go for donations to the charity.
4. Once the student has been signed up for the contest and accepted as an eligible contestant, the student joins an online social media game at the tournaments’ specified times and dates.
5. If the student wins anything, then the correct percentage of the winnings will be sent directly to the chosen charities, with the remaining amount sent directly to the school.
6. The university or college then treats the funds as if they were any other type of scholarship and applies the money towards tuition, books and other college-related expenses.

About Grantoo

Grantoo was founded in September 2011 by Dimitri Silam and Mikahael Naayem. These two long-time friends wanted to help students pay college-related expenses. They specifically wanted students to have fun playing social media games while earning money for their tuitions. The founders also wanted to help various charities establish a steady base of donors and volunteers. Moreover, Grantoo’s founders wanted to acknowledge and reward the numerous businesses that contribute to educational funds and charitable causes. So the founders established a social media community where students, schools, businesses, and charities could constantly interact with each other. The two founders also established a business that is both, for-profit and non-profit, to go along with the social media website.

The Grantoo Foundation represents the non-profit part of the business. The foundation partners with local colleges, universities and charitable businesses to sponsor tournaments that allow eligible college students to earn tuition-related prizes. The tournament sponsors send their checks to the foundation, which makes the donations tax deductible for the contributors. Then a hundred percent of the foundation’s funds get distributed among the winning students and charities. Although only 40 schools are currently on the eligibility list, the Grantoo founders are hoping to add more colleges and universities in the near future. They also hope to increase the level of participation by students, businesses and charities, as well as expand the number and types of games available on the Grantoo social platform.

The for-profit part of the Grantoo business lets companies sponsor regular games and advertise on the social media website. However, there’s no tuition prizes awarded for winning these regular games. Instead, the students win other prizes, such as discount coupons or free promotional merchandise from national brands. The companies can also list their available internships, which the students can then search for by company or category.

About WePay

WePay is an online payment-collecting platform that makes it easier for individuals and groups to accept donations and payments. WePay was founded in 2008 and has been striving to become a major rival to PayPal since its conception. Actually, one of PayPal’s co-founders has become a member of WePay’s impressive list of supportive venture capitalists. WePay currently prides itself on providing great service without all the hassles of requiring the member to set up a merchant account, website or install special programming.

The site also makes it easy for anyone to set up a fund-raising “ribbon” that can be used to promote any cause. The cause can be a public or more personal cause, such as raising funds for college-related expenses or paying medical bills. According to WePay CEO Bill Clerico, they help college students collect money online every day. CEO Clerico stated that WePay understands how financially stressful those college years can be and that is why they are thrilled to be Grantoo’s launch partner.

Social gaming for fund-raising purposes is not a new concept. Nor is it a new concept to have businesses sponsor charitable events or college-related tournaments. It’s also not a new idea to require game winners to donate a certain percentage of the winnings to a charity. It most certainly isn’t unusual to find college students promoting a good cause on social media sites or playing social games. However, it is a unique concept to set up a social media community specifically for the purpose of creating long-term beneficial relationships between schools, charities, students and businesses. Hopefully, Grantoo and WePay will be successful enough to set new trends in the way fund-raising is done, both online and off-line.

Further Reading

More than half of people in San Francisco county have college degrees, though you’d never believe it if you try to get on the Embarcadero Freeway from 16th Street on a Friday. The Chronicle of Higher Education offers a great interactive map of the U.S., broken down by county, of people with at least a BA. At 51% percent, SF county about doubles the national average of 27.5%.

But the question is: have all those fraternity rushes and caffeine soaked cramming sessions translated into cold, hard cash? Suprisingly, yes. San Francisco, San Mateo, and surrounding counties have a median income of $60,000 or more, far above the national average household income of $49,000. Interesting side note: $49K per house (adjusted for inflation) is now the lowest it’s been since 1996.

This map is a great time sink if you are curious about education and income. For example, you will notice that higher percentages of degrees in a population generally translate into higher median incomes. Richer counties are also generally near major universities, like the Bay Area, Harvard, Yale, Georgetown, Madison, WI, and Boulder, CO.

You might wonder why these high income counties are clustered around university towns. Because people come from all over the country to go to college and scatter again after graduation, the median incomes seems like they should be more evenly spread across the country. But according to Forbes magazine’s list of the nation’s richest communities, university towns tend to hold onto wealth because of the large number of government employees in these areas. Also, successful startups like Google tend to locate where there is a good supply of highly educated university students who will work for popcorn and beer.

Another research rabbit hole you can go down is the county of Elko, in the northeast corner of Nevada, where only 15% of the population has a college degree but incomes are spiking over $100,000. What is the secret of this wealthy community hidden in the mountains of nowhere? It turns out it really is what you think. Elko leads the nation in gold mining, with another boom cycle that took off in 2009.

But if you don’t want sift dirt all day in a freezing mountain stream with a mule and a tin of boiled beans, your best shot at making a living is higher education. According to Census Bureau data, here are average earnings by degree:

Advanced degrees: $83, 144

Bachelor’s only: $58,613

High school diploma: $31,283

Of course, this doesn’t include considerations of debt, which some are predicting will be the next debt crisis on par with the collapse of housing values. This weekend, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that student loan debt just hit $1 trillion. This is affecting both students, who are now more reluctant to make big purchases or are unable to do so due to back credit, and parents who dipped into nest eggs and saw their retirement accounts vanish due to falling home values.

Overall, people with a college education bring in an average of $650,000 more over a lifetime than those with just a high school. Reducing student debt, perhaps by working for a startup for popcorn and beer, appears to be the critical factor in success after graduation.

This week the Wall Street Journal profiled the launch of a new online university from a company based in San Francisco. New Charter University will offer tuition of about $800 per semester for as many courses as a student can finish. Including books and fees, people can obtain a bachelor’s from home for about $6,500 over four years. Students can even prepare for free by joining an online community that lets them access course materials and take practice quizzes.

For comparison, California Coast University is currently one of the lowest-priced online universities at a rate of $150/per credit hour. Degrees average 126 credit hours, which totals about $19,000 for tuition alone — double that for books and fees over 4 or more years. Still, $38K is a great deal compared to a brick-and-mortarboard university like the University of California. Their website recommends that instate residents prepare to pay over $120 K for a 4 year degree.

So what does a traditional university have to do to justify $120 K over $6 K to study in your pajamas? Many already say they can’t. (See my blog on Peter Thiel’s mixed message on the value of university education.)

Gene Wade, CEO of UniversityNow, which created of New Charter University, said, “We wanted to create a high quality university where monthly tuition payments are the size of a cable bill, not the size of a mortgage payment.” One of the ways they are able to achieve this rate is by eliminating student recruitment costs and financial-aid administration. That’s right, no financial aid, but the difference in cost more than makes up for the loss.

In addition, though interactions are not face to face, that is rare at traditional universities as well due to the professor to student ratios. New Charter University reports that faculty can interact with students an average of 32 hours per week, compared to ten hours at a traditional university on a slow week. Students also get targeted support and customized instruction more in-line with tutoring and absent from lecture halls.

So does this mean enrollment in “meatspace” universities is falling? Not by a long shot. The National Center for Education Statistics reported that enrollment has increased 38% overall over that past 10 years. For people over 25, enrollment has boosted by 43%.

For online courses, enrollment is actually slowing down. The Babson Survey Research Group’s annual survey, “Going the Distance: Online Education in the United States”, announced last year that “The slower rate of growth in the number of students taking at least one online course as compared to previous years may be the first sign that the upward rise in online enrollments is approaching a plateau.”

Your guess is a good as mine to explain this trend. The report suggested one obvious reason, “There remains a consistent and sizable minority that see online as inferior.” That minority includes most employers and HR departments. This may just represent slow adoption as online universities are fairly new in the ancient world of education.

Some other reasons could be that students want to be around other students for the college experience, that barriers to exit are much lower when you study from home, and that most popular professors prefer traditional universities.

Regardless, online universities like the University of Phoenix have now added physical campuses as traditional universities add more online classes. But it’s likely that this new super low-cost option will make some dramatic changes in the landscape of higher education.

California residents are currently in an uproar over Cal State’s proposed budget cut measures. They are even more upset about the recent announcement that two of CSU’s college presidents will be receiving 10 percent pay raises. Most are simply trying to understand the logic behind the California State University trustees’ recent decisions.

Budget cuts

The Board of Trustees of the nation’s largest public university system is claiming that they are in dire financial straits. They had to trim the budget for the 2011-2012 fiscal year by $750 million. Another $200 million in budget cuts will have to take place for the 2012-2013 fiscal year if a tax increase measure doesn’t pass the November ballot. The planned budget cuts may include any combination of:

Slashing enrollment and establishing an admissions freeze where applicants are put on a waiting list.

Terminating low-enrollment programs

Laying off approximately 3,000 faculty and staff members

Eliminating athletic and other non-academic programs

Limiting the number of courses a student can take, with a maximum of 15-17 credits each term (except for graduating seniors)

Limiting library acquisitions

Delaying maintenance projects

Continuing a hiring freeze

Streamlining operations

Under the current plan, only a few of the 23 campuses will be accepting any new students for the spring 2013 semester. Only eight campuses will be accepting students transferring from community colleges for the spring 2013 term. These campuses are: Channel Islands, Chico, East Bay, Fullerton, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Bernardino, and Sonoma. None of the Cal State campuses will be making early admissions decisions until after the November election has taken place. All applicants are being warned that admittance is contingent on the passing of the tax measure. Students can expect the fall 2013 enrollment options to be very limited for all 23 campuses.

These drastic measures will affect thousands of people. The California State University system is the main source of education for the majority of California’s bachelor-level students. The massive 23-university network typically uses 44,000 faculty and staff members to serve a 427,000-member student body. However, Cal State has reported that it has already received 665,860 applications for the next fall term by first-time freshmen and transfer students. Even though the enrollment applications have increased by nearly 55,000 students over last year’s total, Cal State says it may have to reduce last year’s enrollment by at least 3 percent. This means about 70,000 to 75,000 students will be denied access to the state’s public university system, which is mostly funded by California taxpayers.

Pay raise for two college president

The trustees have asked Chancellor Charles Reed to devise alternatives for raising income and the extreme budgetary measures. They especially want him to find alternatives to the dire enrollment limitation measures and need for tuition hikes. However, the Board of Trustees simultaneously voted to increase the pay for two college presidents while they were planning the extreme budget cuts. The new presidents at Fullerton’s and East Bay’s campuses will get a 10 percent pay hike. According to CSU administrators, the pay hikes are necessary in order to attract and retain executive talent.
Basically, this means that the nation’s largest public university system is planning on harshly reducing the accessibility and quality of a higher education to thousands of students. At the same time that they layoff 3,000 faculty and staff members, they are going to increase the pay of two college presidents by the highest amount of pay raise that is allowed by law. CSU East Bay President Leroy Morishita will now be paid a base salary of $303,660. CSU Fullerton President Mildred Garcia will receive a base salary of $324,500. Both will also receive the same $12,000 car allowance and $60,000 housing allowance that all of the CSU presidents currently receive. These salaries and perks are higher than those received by the President of the U.S., the California governor and the Chief of the Supreme Court.

Reactions to budget cuts and pay raises

Various people have publically responded to the proposed budget cut measures and presidential pay hikes. Some of these reactions are:

Governor Jerry Brown – “It’s very important, but I do think when you are talking $250,000 to $300,000 and you also give housing and car allowance, that’s a lot given the retrenchment that we all have to face. Governor Brown believes that CSU administrators are “setting a pattern for public service that we cannot afford.”

State Senator Leland Yee- Senator Yee has introduced a bill to cap campus presidents’ pay increases while tuition is being hiked. He stated, “When the students are suffering, CSU should not be handing out such exorbitant executive compensation.”

State Senator Ted Lieu – Senator Lieu has also sponsored a bill that would keep CSU executives from receiving pay hikes during bad fiscal years and within three years of any tuition hikes. Senator Lieu considers CSU’s current CEO-level compensation packages to be egregious considering CSU’s and the state’s continuous fiscal crises. He also thinks the CSU managers are bilking California taxpayers while undermining the affordability of the public university.

John Seibert Farnsworth of Santa Clara – “In essence, the people of California have reneged on our contract with these students, and we’ve done so at a point when they have already invested two years of work at the community college level. He was referring to transfer students from community colleges.

Antoine Wilson, a senior at Cal State Dominguez Hills – “They’re forcing us to make cuts because they don’t have the money to pay for academic services, but they’re approving salary increases. It shows you where their priorities are.”

Shery Bacon, counselor at Hamilton High School – “It would continue to eliminate opportunities for our students. As a counselor, I already feel concerned and hypocritical when referring students to higher education when I know those seats are dwindling and now being put on hold.”

Sylvia Womak (Polytechnic High counselor) and Dan Nannini (Santa Monica counselor)- Both Ms. Womack and Mr. Nannini think these measures will force students to choose attending colleges out-of-state or else attend private schools. They also believe that it will force many students to delay their college graduation or else forego getting a college degree altogether.

George Escutia, Jr., student at Norco College – “The hold on enrollment is unfair to thousands of students who now must wait on the outcome of an election to find out if they will be attending a CSU. We cannot continue to determine our economic future on election cycles. California must re-invest in education.”

Gerald Good, retiree – “Why not make major use of the Internet and do most of the teaching online? It would cut costs significantly and thereby provide wider access.”

The California Faculty Association (CFA) represents CSU faculty members in their fight to stop CSU from taking these dire measures. They highly condemned the CSU chancellor and Board of Trustees for their actions and attitudes in a recent report. CFA released a report titled: For-Profit Higher Education and the California State University, a Cautionary Tale.” In this report, CFA warns the public that CSU’s top management are trying to use the Extended Education programs to by-pass public accountability. They also claim that the programs will be used to create new opportunities for exploiting California’s struggling student population. According to the report, most of the Extended Education programs that incorporate the Internet into the teaching have dismally failed. The statistics demonstrate that most students do not do as well in online classes as they do in the traditional brick and mortar classrooms.

CFA also questions the logic of lavishing exorbitant executive salaries during the worst economic downturn in California since the Great Depression. They are asking why a university chancellor and campus presidents should each receive higher salaries and more perks than the U.S. president. CSU presidents also have higher salaries and perks than the Chief of the Supreme Court and the Governor of California. CFA especially wants to know why the top executives are being treated like CEOs rather than the public servants they are supposed to be. The association also offered several alternatives to the proposed budget cut measures and pay hikes.